Wednesday, February 2 at 10 p.m. – Green Builders

(Rochester, NY) – A quiet green revolution in the building world is evolving; a first wave of innovative green design projects large and small has already hit the ground. Green Builders, airing Wednesday, February 2 at 10 p.m. on WXXI-TV/HD (DT21.1/cable1011 and 11), profiles a cast of green building pioneers in New Jersey who have taken the leap into making their part of the “built environment” a more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly place.

The hour-long program features three stories:

Turning Green Building Theory Into Green Reality
There is no single way to build green. Green Builders takes a wide-ranging look at a variety of approaches and levels of commitment and at the individuals who have helped turn green building theory into reality. These individuals aren’t just builders and designers; they’re teachers and homeowners, corporate leaders and academic specialists, leaders of institutions and universities, as well as renegade inventors. From the Willow School to PNC Bank to the first solar-hydrogen home called the Hopewell Project, people talk about why they made the move to go green, what the challenges were and how their project fared.

Smart Planning and New Ways of Thinking
In most cases, one finds that a green building project has more to do with smart planning and a mind set change about energy use than expensive technologies or consumer sacrifice. Innovation helps, and Green Builders includes plenty of innovations that are making green technology effective and affordable: geothermal storage, wind farms and extensive solar array systems. As the stories in the documentary demonstrate, it is crucial for us to change our perspective on how we build, recognizing the wasteful impacts of the traditional mode of building and operating our structures, and realizing the environmental and economic benefits of building green. Only then will the green building movement be successful.

Changing a Carbon Footprint: Collectively Building the Foundation for a Movement
The individuals in Green Builders have made the move to building green without suffering, sacrificing or experimenting with a “might-happen.” These are real projects on the ground, working businesses and college campuses that prove we can change our carbon footprint once we change our way of looking at how a structure operates. Collectively, the green builders are erecting the foundation of a more widespread movement toward making America’s built environment less harmful to the dwindling supply of healthy natural resources and even less expensive to operate. Their homes and offices are the proving grounds for green building, and their personal experiences reveal that building greener is less complicated and expensive than people probably thought — and more rewarding in the long run.

Photo caption: This program profiles a cast of green building pioneers who have taken the leap into making their part of the "built environment" a more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly place. Pictured: Solar roofing on a barn.

Credit: None given

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